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Solar Eclipse Image Processing

For the 2017 August 21st Total Solar Eclipse, we were onsite in Wyoming taking images with a 13 year old Canon DSLR with a 75-300mm lens, on a manual non-tracking tripod. Every few minutes the tripod had to be moved to recenter the sun. We were taking 1 image every 1 minute.
The raw result was this, the sun all over the frame:

For weeks now I have been trying to figure out a process to centre and crop these 200+ images so that the sun is centered and not moving around the frame.
I finally found the software: PIPP, and the process.
Here are the same three frames as above, but centered and cropped to 500×500 pixels from the original 3072×2048 pixels

Much better results!

This is the first pass of an animated .gif (warning 20MB!) of 176 of the 200+ images. Some of the images were zoomed to a different scale, some were touching the edge of the frame or had other problems that caused them to be deleted from the sequence. There is still some wobbly motion and I am not yet sure why it is there… will be processing some more to find out.

There were also some dropped frames of the diamond ring effect… the process could not figure out what was what and just dropped them out of the sequence. Will see if those can be added back in as well.

Click on the static image to the right to see the animated .gif image:

I used this as a starting point:
https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/example-uasge/example3
PIPP is available for free at:
https://sites.google.com/site/astropipp/downloads